1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming method and an image forming apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, variable printing has become widely used in a print on demand (POD) field. When sorting is performed in accordance with the delivery destinations and delivery methods of printed matter, and the classification and levels of customers, it is possible to perform the sorting by the number of sheets of paper simply in accordance with the classification when the printed matter includes only the same image like the printed matter of offset printing. However, it is necessary for the variable printing to perform the sorting in accordance with the content (part having the possibility of changing in each piece of the printed matter) of the printed matter because the contents of all pages can be different from one another basically.
For example, there is a case of sorting sheets of paper addressed to the customers living in the Tokyo district and sheets of paper addressed to the customers living in the Osaka district. Moreover, there is a case of sending catalogs having different contents according to the degree of importance of customers at the time of sending out direct mail as follows: enclosing a free invitation card of an event and a discount ticket with a catalog to each of the most important customers, enclosing a discount ticket with a catalog to each of important customers, and sending only a catalog to each of ordinary customers. Alternatively, there can be a case of sending a discount ticket of shopping to each of female customers, and of sending an invitation card of an amusement park to each of the customers each having a family.
In order to perform such sorting, there are a method of performing printing in the order according to sorting, and a method of performing sorting by printing additional information, such as a bar code, in a margin of printed matter in advance, and scanning the additional information to compare the scanned data with data in a database. Moreover, it is also possible to show the use application of a paper bundle by placing a cover page on which the use application of the paper bundle is entered on the paper bundle after sorting.
Moreover, a technique to make it easy to perform sorting by entering a character string in a delimited tab has been proposed for an image forming apparatus to divide one side of a sheet of paper into a plurality of regions, and to print delimited tabs for sorting to each of the divided regions (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2000-22935).
However, the method of performing printing in the order according with sorting has a problem of not being able to perform complicated variable printing. Moreover, the method of scanning additional information requires comparatively large scale system architecture for interlocking a scanning mechanism with the database, and it is difficult for a user of a business scale of performing the conventional simple sorting to introduce the method owing to its cost. Moreover, the method of placing a cover page on which a use application is entered has the problem of not being able to judge the use application when the cover page has been lost or when the cover page is replaced.
Moreover, in all of the cases, there was a possibility that sorted sheets of paper are used for another use application by mistake such as a case where a paper group of a customer A is put in an envelope of a customer B.